Carl Jung and therapy, dreams, self-organization, and autism: introduction

Carl Jung, therapy, dreams, autism

How is my personality organized? How is it trying to unfold and where is it caught? How can I release it? As an analyst I am forever asking these questions. Notice that I say personality. I use that word rather than ego or psyche because it is more immediate and more inclusive. A personality is what I encounter whenever I deal with another person. It is a system of instincts, impulses, feelings, sensory images, ideas and attitudes, some from the past and some from the present. Some parts of the personality are creative and expansive, some parts are pinched and rigid. Some parts are loving, some parts destructive.

In my first article I point out that my personality is a living system, a psychological system which co-exists with my physical system. It follows that, like every other living system, my personality is self-organized. It is not ordered from above, like a platoon in an army, but from within, like a group of people who gather together spontaneously around a common interest.

In my second article I show that, though self-organization is spontaneous, it is not random: it leads to predictable forms. If we study a group of people who gather around a common interest, we see predictable patterns. At times, for example, one person accepts responsibility and others depend on that person to do so. This pattern expresses a pre-existing mathematical (that is, spiritual) principle: the principle "guides" the formation of the pattern. Each principle is specific and the total number of principles is limited. I argue that a pre-existing principle is what Jung called an archetype-as-such.

I visualize such a principle not as an abstraction but as an image. I see the principle of responsibility, for example, as an image of a father. This is an archetypal image. In part the principle guides my personality by means of the image. When I need to organize myself for responsibility I imagine myself as a father. This suggests a radical question. The most important stage in the self-organization of the personality is the stage when development first begins. All subsequent development must flow from it. Can we identify a principle (and its image) which guides a very early stage of self-organization?

In my third and fourth articles I present evidence that the image of the mother's eyes is crucial to early development: when an infant fails to internalize that image the result may be autism. The third article is organized for an audience which tends to think in terms of science, while the fourth article is organized for an audience which tends to think in terms of therapy. The hypothesis of these two articles leads to a testable prediction. The incidence of autism has increased dramatically in recent years. The increase may be due to the increased use of non-maternal child care for infants. If so, autism and the early use of child care will be statistically correlated.

My fifth article is a more accessible summary of the third and fourth. It focuses on autism and early child care.

The sixth article proves that there is a statistical correlation between autism and the use of early non-maternal child care or, specifically, television. Thus the results of a rigorous statistical test have confirmed the prediction which was generated by my hypothesis.

The seventh article describes research performed in 2008 which shows that nine-month-old infants who are known to be at risk for autism have measurable deficiencies in their preference for eye contact.